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Heather Weiss

Welcome to The Evaluation Exchange: Emerging Strategies in Evaluating Child and Family Services. We at Harvard Family Research Project (HFRP) have created this newsletter to serve as a clearinghouse for the best and most innovative approaches to evaluation that the field has to offer. This is an interactive newsletter, designed to serve as a vehicle for problem-solving, for discovering new ideas and approaches, and for discussing your own successes and struggles with evaluation. In fact, The Evaluation Exchange depends upon your willingness to be an active participant. We urge you to submit summaries of your own work, suggestions for books or articles to be reviewed, and ideas about issues that would benefit from a public discussion within the newsletter. Please let us know of any colleagues who should receive The Evaluation Exchange.

Our publication emerges at a critical time for those of us who work in the arena of child and family services. The past decade has been one of enormous innovation and experimentation, resulting in a wide range of creative attempts to overcome the shortcomings of existing programs and systems. Yet with these innovations has come an array of evaluation challenges; the field has struggled to develop new measures and methodologies that accurately reflect the complexities inherent in new programming. The Evaluation Exchange will provide needed public forum on evaluation. By learning from one another, I hope that we can avoid “reinventing the wheel” and rise to the challenges posed by changes in this field.

The Evaluation Exchange will be issued quarterly. While the format will evolve in response to reader feedback, each issue will contain features on key issues in evaluating community-based family support programs and comprehensive systems reform initiatives. “Promising Practices” will highlight innovative strategies and provide contacts for more information. “New and Noteworthy” will direct your attention to particularly insightful recent publications. We also have a section devoted to useful resources accessible by computer called “Electronic Mailbox.” In future issues, “Questions and Answers” will highlight frequently asked evaluation questions and solicit answers from experienced evaluators. All issues will rely on you, the reader, to be a key player in this problem-solving exchange.

Some issues will have special themes. Our focus for this initial issue is systems reform. The next issue will examine the challenges of evaluating school-linked services.

The Evaluation Exchange is part of our aim to stimulate discussion, promote development, and build capacity for new approaches to evaluation in the field of child and family support. We hope that this newsletter will provide a broad audience with significant new knowledge and resources. We invite you to join us as we explore evaluation’s potential to meet the emerging needs of the child and family services field.

Heather B. Weiss, Ed.D.
Founder & Director
Harvard Family Research Project

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